I like the hyper effect, but it loses too much contrast when flashing. I think should look more like this

Red, blue, and magenta need to be lightened up, but you catch my drift, right?

This is pretty much what I had in mind; my earlier animation was a hack job done in one minute while I talked on the phone just to illustrate what I meant, and was nowhere near final. I noticed you kept the black, well, black; I kind of like the effect overall, but some characters (like Shadow) end up flashing too little. Hm.

Edit: More silly things:

How was this done, can this be done with cheat engine to change the player pointer for each character like in Mania?

How hard would it be to have both a single universal palette and pre-determined teams both in the same rom as a toggle-able setting? Don't get me wrong I like the idea of any character being selectable, but I do see a lot of value in keeping having the teams theme. selfishly I do enjoy looking at sprites what haven't been butchered into a single unified palette, I'm a sucker for colour fidelity and the homage to the 'Heroes' game the title is based on

Push it further and game-ify the process by having a progression in unlocking characters (that you can cheat code?) where you can unlock the single unified palette mode characters by playing and completing the game with different teams, unlocking that team's characters

maybe the latter suggestion is pushing it a bit too far but I would (selfishly) be a bit sad to see the teams thing go. Maybe i should get over it aye.

How was this done, can this be done with cheat engine to change the player pointer for each character like in Mania?

This was done after a lot of incremental changes towards flexibilizing the way players work, which I have been doing for years in unreleased builds, finally got to the point of fruition. It is theoretically possible to do in a cheat engine, but you would need to replace most of the ROM by cheat codes to be able to replicate it.

Neo, on 31 August 2017 - 03:01 AM, said:

Oh WOW this was the slowest turnaround ever.

To be fair, it has been there for quite a while, I just never got around to making a release with this new HUD. Which I should, it looks SO much better...

Drex, on 31 August 2017 - 10:24 AM, said:

That would require duplicates of every character sprite. I don't believe there'd be enough space for the extra art.

It is worse than that; Super Sonic, Knuckles and Espio actually have parts of their sprites in separate palette lines (the green eyes for Super Sonic, the green socks for Knuckles and Espio), meaning that they rely on having green colors on other palette lines. When I swap to the universal palettes, I will be editing the levels back to the stock art, which will make some things look better again in several places (such as the BG not flashing in CPZ2 when you hit Eggman).

So I would need to have duplicate art and mappings for every character, object and level. Yeah, I am not going to do that.

I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned this, but I found a vendor in Texas who is selling this mod on hardware at-cost(parts and a little for labor) with a game case and everything. Damn shame it wouldn't work with my EA 4-Way play.